Beau Elliot
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Remember when Sen. Marc Rubio was the bright, shining knight of the Republican establishment? Me, neither, and it was only about 15 seconds ago.
But now, apparently, he’s a dead duck quacking. (Sorry, Andy Warhol; your timeline got deconstructed. Happens to the best of us and, it seems, to most robotic of us.)
Of course, the people saying Rubio is a dead duck quacking (my words, not theirs) are the same heavy-hitting, word-merchant pundits who have been wrong on practically everything during this wacky election cycle.
Well, OK, most of them were right about Hillary Clinton being the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic nomination, and she does have nearly 2.5 times the number of delegates that Sen. Bernie Sanders has. So, yeah, odds-on favorite. But we could have asked Las Vegas about that eight months ago and saved ourselves several hundred thousand words of enlightenment.
But meanwhile, back at Rubio and quacking, the Florida senator did have a rather disastrous “Super Saturday” on March 5. As the Washington Post’s Daily 202 reports, “Joe Scarborough calls it ‘a Saturday night massacre for Rubio.’ ” Erick Erickson wants Rubio to get out of the race as soon as possibly, preferably yesterday, Rich Lowry of the National Review says Rubio has “collapsed,” and Newt Gingrich, Matthew Dowd, Laura Ingraham, Alexis Levinson, and Ross Douthat, among others, all think that Rubio is a dead duck you-know-whating.
And Donald Trump (whose campaign was supposed to wither and die by the end of August) wants Rubio to drop out so he can go mano-a-mano with Ted Cruz. Or maybe it’s head-to-head. Or maybe they could compare hand sizes.
Trump, of course, would like everybody else to drop out of the race — Rubio, Cruz, whatever the name of the Ohio governor is, Clinton, Sanders, and Joe the Plumber — so he could be appointed Il Duce, fire Congress, and get on with the business of making the trains run on time.
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Word hasn’t arrived yet on whether the first Il Duce made the trains run on time, but he sure knew how to lose a war.
Meanwhile, Sen. Cruz, R-Astroid Belt, is apparently the only establishment Republican left standing against Trump. If so, that means the word “establishment” has lost all meaning, because Cruz seems to believe that the Republican establishment only exists for his hand-grenade practice.
And then there’s this: In a recent speech, Cruz went on a verbal rampage against President Obama, including accusing Obama of creating TARP.
Unfortunately for Cruz, there’s something called history, and some of us have at least a faint memory of how to read it. At least once in a while. Then-President George W. Bush signed TARP into law in October 2008.
Luckily for us, we don’t have to think about TARP; we can think about the NFL. Thank god.
Except that the NFL, in a breathtaking move, just brought back Deflategate back from the nonliving dead. I know that sounds redundant. But you know TV these days; it has living dead strolling around all over the plantation. They’re called Republican debates.
And I guess that when you totally ignore the Ideal Gas Law, which the NFL did, it truly is breathtaking. In fact, whenever Roger Goodell, the commissar of the NFL, utters a new edict in his own peculiar way, I find it hard to take a breath.
Speaking of quacking.
